The Home Stretch

Regular Chiropractic Care and Effective Stretching

Starting a stretching program is appropriate for most people. As we want to get the most out of our stretching routine, it's important to ensure that our musculoskeletal system is working at peak capacity.

Regular chiropractic care performs these essential services by detecting, analyzing, and correcting spinal misalignments. Left uncorrected, such misalignments cause muscles, ligaments, and joints to become tight and irritated and also cause irritation to spinal nerves. By correcting spinal misalignments, your spinal nerves are free to conduct information properly between your brain and the rest of your body. Your musculoskeletal system is enabled to do its job properly. The result is that regular chiropractic care helps to optimize the functioning of our muscles, bones, and joints, thereby making our stretching and exercise time useful, healthful, and profitable.

Thanks to effective public health campaigns regarding healthy lifestyle choices, many people have incorporated regular, vigorous exercise, a nutritious diet, and getting sufficient rest in their daily routines. For many people, an additional important component of a healthy lifestyle is regular stretching.

Regular stretching provides numerous benefits, including enhanced flexibility and adaptability of your musculoskeletal system, that is, your bones, muscles, and joints.1 As a result, regular stretching helps improve overall mobility and range of motion. Regular stretching helps reduce injury by improving circulation, bringing increased supplies of oxygen and critical nutrients to the large muscles of your thighs and legs and the small muscles of your back. As a bonus, regular stretching helps to reduce stress. It's clear that stretching activities provide a very big return for a modest investment of time and effort.2,3

In order to derive the greatest benefits from your stretching program, knowledge of stretching "best practices" is essential. First, it's critical to conceive of stretching as a journey rather than a destination. In stretching, we have to give up all our notions of how much we think we should be able to achieve. On any given day, our muscles will be tighter or less tight. On any given day, it will be "harder" or easier to obtain the stretchability of the day before. The best practice is to pay attention to your body, focus on what you're doing, and work with what you have on a particular day. This "centering" approach is in direct contrast to trying to force your muscles to conform to the stretching length you think they should achieve. Using force while stretching will always result in injury. Instead, the activity of stretching calls for a calm, steady, and methodical approach.

What is it that you're doing when you stretch? Primarily, you're using a process of visualization. You're visualizing the particular muscle getting "longer". When you do a stretch for your hamstring muscle group (there are three muscles that comprise this group), you have an image in your mind of the muscles of the back of your thigh and you're "seeing" these muscles lengthening. You're not actually "doing" anything other than performing the activity of the stretch itself. In other words, you're not actively making the hamstrings longer. But you are "seeing" them lengthen in your mind, and the result is an effective stretch, that is, increased length and flexibility of the hamstring group.

Pictures of the quadriceps muscle group (the muscles on the front of your thigh), the hamstring muscle group, the calf muscles (the surface gastrocnemius and the deeper soleus), and your spinal muscle groups will provide great assistance with your visualization process. Such images are widely available on the Internet. Your "Zen-like" process of visualization will make your 10 or 15 minutes of stretching time more effective and may also be applied to various other tasks throughout your day, providing additional ongoing benefits to your health and well being.

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Special Notices

WELLSBORO OFFICE IS NOW OFFEREING REFLEXOLOGY
"Working the Sole to Touch the Soul" Ron Hagy - Certified ReflexologistWhat Is Reflexology?

Reflexology is an ancient practice, used to stimulate the foot reflexes to help trigger certain parts of the body. There are over 7000 nerve endings in each of your feet. All the nerves correspond to a certain part of the body. This includes muscles, organs, glands, bones, and everything in between. These nerves are tender to the touch when the corresponding body part has stress on it (be that an illness, injury, or poor muscle function). As the session progresses the body will start to detox and eliminate the toxins that have built up over time. This reduction in tenderness reflects the work the body is doing to try to correct the issue and naturally heal.

Call Wellsboro Office to Schedule Apts. #570-723-5000

Exciting New Service's Have Arrived In BOTH Offices !!!

Welcome Dr. Brittany D.C. She will be working with Dr. Lisa at both locations. New Services Include: Taping, Sport taping: Taping is used over and around the muscles to help improve muscular function and help decrease pain. Scrapping a technique used to help with inflammation, scar tissue and tight muscles. This a form of soft tissue therapy. Apt will also be available to work with Dr. Brittany on special exercises to help strength and support those trouble areas that you suffer from with pain. We will be posting weekly videos to demonstrate these new techniques.